30 November 2011 2:29 PM

ABOVE David Millar’s head as he spoke to a London conference were three large photographs of cyclists of his generation with one thing in common. All are dead. “Doping kills people,” Millar told his audience.

Millar knows all there is about doping. He admitted to doing it to himself to French police after they found two used syringes in a book case in his home, souvenirs, he said, of his past. He served a suspension and remains excluded for life from the Olympic Games because of the British Olympic Association’s zero-tolerance byelaw.

Millar is a poacher turned gamekeeper. He is the athletes’ representative now on the World Anti Doping Agency, the body charged with coordinating the fight against doping. He speaks out wherever he can against doping. He has written a book “Racing Through the Dark” exposing it.

But to listen to his eloquent outpouring on the matter is to be left wondering whether there was anybody in professional road cycling in the 1990s and early years of this millennium who was not doping.

Millar entered the professional world aged 19 “blinkered and a little bit naive”. Some riders in the amateur world he left warned him but he dismissed them as “embittered” that he had been offered a contract when they had not.

“You have a false sense of security in those around you. I had no idea that doping was so prevalent but within a few weeks it was obvious drugs were everywhere. The syringe culture was enormous. People were doing it to themselves,” said Millar.

“I went very quickly from this idealist view to finding myself in this underworld that nobody outside it knew about.”

He remembers in his first year as a professional a team mate he was rooming with being given a cortisone steroid injection, a common treatment for inflamed joints. “Is this normal?” asked Millar. “Yes,” said the other cyclist, “but not before the first race of the season.”

Millar said he held out against doping for 4 ½ years “knowing it was going on around me”. He did not speak out, he said, because “who could I tell? I was at the bottom of the chain.”

The only person he told was his mother. “Come home,” she said, but that was the last thing on his mind. “I was living my dream.”

After three years he began injecting himself with vitamins and amino acids, neither banned but an introduction to the syringe culture. A year later, forced by his team to race 58 days straight before the Tour de France, he was so exhausted he crashed in the Prologue.

Even then he was persuaded to continue “for the team” for another nine stages before he took a break. It should have been a long one but instead he used the time to allow his team to inject him with performance enhancing substances that could put him back in the saddle more quickly.

“I had injections five nights in a row and it was like I was a f....... motor bike. They say the difference is one per cent but that’s enormous. Nobody could stay with me.

“You get to thinking you’re better than you are, lose touch with reality. I couldn’t sleep at night but on the bike I was unbelievable. “

In 2003, after winning the world time trial title, he decided he would go back to being “clean”. He kept the last syringes he had used, like an ex-smoker keeps a packet around the house, to remind him of his darkest days.

It was those in the end that led to his unmasking. After 48 hours in a police cell, he decided to tell the truth. “I resented the sport. It was like a massive weight lifted off my shoulders. I told them everything,” he recalled.

He was banned for two years, reduced to a year on appeal, fined 2,000 euros and stripped of his world title.

For a while he never wanted to compete again but 11 months later while in Manchester he rode a bike in the Peak District and “fell back in love with the sport”.

So how does he see the punishment the BOA is fighting to sustain of an Olympic life ban? In truth, as a left-over from another age. “It is a draconian inquisition. We’re not Victorian aristocracy. This is a massive business,” he said.

“Nothing is ever as black and white as that. A 16-year-old given drugs by a coach is way different from a 30 year old injecting himself. The way the system operates now is going to seem like something from the dark ages in ten years time.”

So what would he do to punish? “Ban everybody for four years for a first offence but allow WADA the flexibility to reduce that to two if the guilty cooperate, admit their guilt and name names among support staff, doctors, coaches.”

As for the result of the appeal against the British ban, he is indifferent. “I wrote off the Olympics a long time ago. If the system changes, I am not going to involve myself on a personal level.

“I’d be proud to be on the British team (in London), especially the British cycling team, and to race with guys who are very close to me. I’d have nothing much to gain personally but I’d gain pleasure from helping Mark Cavendish (in the road race) to do well.”

Call me naive and sentimental but hearing him out left me thinking the Olympics next year would not be a worse place with his presence.